Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to data storage devices with flash memory and flash memory control methods.
Description of the Related Art
Flash memory, a data storage medium, is common in today's data storage devices. For example, flash memory is typically used in memory cards, USB flash devices, solid-state drives, and so on. In another application with multi-chip package technology, a NAND flash chip and a controller chip are combined in one package as an embedded multi-media card (eMMC).
A flash memory device provides storage space which is divided into blocks, and each block includes a plurality of physical pages. An erase operation designed for flash memory is performed on a block-by-block basis, to release space one block at a time. When updating data, the new data is written into a spare space rather than being overwritten on the old data. Thus, it is more complex to manage a flash memory rather than other conventional storage mediums, especially if the flash memory architecture is more complex (comprising multi-level cells and single-level cells).